The beatniks were all the rage, and Allen Ginsberg, the prophet of this generation of disheveled, bearded and crazy young people, spent his days in downtown Lima buying ether in pharmacies. This story takes place more than fifty years ago during the poet’s trip through South America in which he passed through Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, in the back of an overcrowded truck stuffed full of Indians, trying to get to Peru.[2]

At that time Ginsberg was the spokesperson for the conscience of the world: a precursor to the hippies, an open homosexual in an era pre-dating gay liberation, and a cheerful volunteer for the first experiments with LSD, the drug that would later provoke the psychedelic explosion in San Francisco. His mission in Peru was to replicate the experiences of his friend William S. Burroughs, who, seven years previously, had visited Colombia and Peru in search of ayahuasca, the mythical hallucinogenic plant which serves as a bridge between this world and that of the gods.

The first thing he did upon arriving in Peru was to take a train to Cusco, a city that surprised him with its antiquity. Anxious to see the Inca ruins, he set out toward Machu Picchu, where a guard offered him lodging at his house, enabling the poet to stay on the mountain for a week. From there, he wrote to his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, describing the cliffs and snowcapped mountains of the Andes. May 4th, after two days and two nights traveling by bus, he finally arrived in Lima, where he had been invited to stay with the Peruvian writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy, whom he had met in Chile.[3]

***

Around that time, a student from the Católica[4] was receiving a risky assignment in the Tingo María airport.[5] Jorge Capriata was tasked with transporting a used whisky bottle full of ayahuasca, and its recipient was none other than the poet Allen Ginsberg, writer of Howl (1956), a poem that had cost him a court trial for its obscenity, and, a few years later, Kaddish (1961) a long litany of love dedicated to his mother, Naomi, who had died in a psychiatric hospital a few years before. Ginsberg was able to locate the bottle under the auspices of Juan Mejía Baca, cultural agent of the time, whose bookstore was a meeting point for the intellectuals of Lima.

In the small, warm lobby of the Institute of Contemporary Art (Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo or IAC) on Ocoña Street, Ginsberg presented his work on May 12, 1960. Carlos Eduardo Zavaleta remembers him as ‘bearded, short, with a loud voice and smoky glasses,’[6] while Capriata describes him reading ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’by William C. Williams in ‘a flat voice without affectation.’[7] After the presentation, Capriata fulfilled his task by giving Ginsberg the bottle concealed in a paper bag.

In its Sunday supplement the conservative newspaper La Prensa commented that Ginsberg ‘was surrounded by accomplished poets, snobs, and other types cut from the same cloth.’[8] It also printed a dialogue that had occurred in North American cultural ambassador Marcia Koth’s house, where a party had taken place:

‘What are you and the other beatnik writers seeking to do?’

‘My goal is God.’

‘Why do you wear blue jeans?’

‘Because I don’t have anything else to wear.’

‘Do you plan to get married?’

‘Never. I prefer men.’

‘Beatniks usually take drugs in order to compose or recite their poems. Have you done that in Lima?’

‘Before the recital I got high on Benzedrine. They have told me about a drink called shushuhuasi that has aphrodisiacal properties. I’d like to drink it in Lima.’[9]

***

After the recital, Capriata was unable to exchange many words with Ginsberg, so they made a date to meet at the Hotel Comercio. But on the agreed day the reporter found him in bed. The gringo had developed a case of hemorrhoids during his trip through the Andes. Legend has it he began his recital at the IAC by commenting: ‘I just arrived from the hospital where I have gone to get my hemorrhoids burned off, because I’m a queer.’ [10]

In Dharma Lion, a biography authorized by Ginsberg, Michael Schumacher confirms that he acquired the malady due to the precarious conditions of the restroom facilities in the high plains of the Andes, even though in a poem called ‘Sphincter’ the poet mentions a ‘fissure operation’ in Bolivia.[11] Either way, Capriata found him convalescing, although Ginsberg nevertheless did not hesitate to tell him of his first experience with the Amazonian potion.

It had happened a few days before in that same room. Capriata recalls: ‘He told me how, in his hallucinations, the adornments on the governmental palace had become gigantic gargoyles that leaned into his balcony, while he contemplated himself, recumbent, and at the same time floating above the hotel bed.’[12]

After a while they decided to go down to the Cordano Bar, which was located a few meters from the hotel. As they left, Capriata and the gringo had a vision: a melancholic man, as if he had come out of nowhere, walked in the shadow of the Estación Desamparados.[13]

Then something strange happened: the two noticed a spider wandering about on Martín Adán’s hat, and Capriata quickly advised him of the occurrence. The legendary Peruvian poet had no better idea than to squash the insect. It was enough to scandalize the Buddhist-like Ginsberg. Even so, Ginsberg invited him to the bar and the author of La casa de cartón accepted his invitation to have a drink, although they did not get along as well as they would later on. Martín Adán, who only knew the beatnik from his scandals, did not have any reservations in asking him:

Later, the Sunday insert of the newspaper El Comercio confirmed this encounter, further commenting in its cultural section that ‘a great friendship has been established between the bearded North American and Martín Adán, who met by chance not long ago. Now they meet up to drink anisette and talk about poetry, like two old friends.’[16]

It was common to find Martín Adán wandering through the streets of downtown Lima, where he carried on a solitary bohemian life. He could often be seen in the bookstore owned by Juan Mejía Baca, who helped the Peruvian poet escape economic strife by publishing his poems. Salazar Bondy describes him in an article as ‘submerged in himself, evasive and sardonic, buried in a deformed hat, covered by a coarse overcoat, with a grown-out beard.’[17]

Thus there was certain natural empathy with the young beatnik, a person who, from his childhood, had struggled with the threat of insanity and was no stranger to psychiatric hospitals. Reciprocally, Ginsberg also became interested in Martín Adán, a man ‘hounded by indigence and alcoholism,’[18] whose situation had forced him to live in cheap hotels and clinics. It was to Adán that Ginsberg would dedicate the poem ‘To an Old Poet in Peru,’ written in Lima and later published in Reality Sandwiches, in which one is able to infer, if only vaguely, the relationship between Ginsberg and the Peruvian poet.

Divided in three parts,[19] Ginsberg’s poem ‘expresses more interest in the pathology of the secret doodles than in the meticulousness of the sonnets that were typical in Martín Adán’s poetry,’[20] and he informs the reader of his desires to leave for the jungle as a sort of forewarning or prophecy: ‘I’m going to Pucallpa / to have Visions.’[21]

II.

One cold autumn morning, with the country ‘paralyzed by a national strike and shadowed by a glacial drizzle,’[22] journalist Alfonso La Torre found Ginsberg in the Hotel Comercio, half-naked, tangled in his sheets, and smoking an Inca Nacional cigarette.[23] La Torre had been commissioned by the journal Cultura Peruana to interview Ginsberg, and what he found was a poet with a working-class spirit.

The result of that encounter was a report in which the journalist narrates the conversation that he had with the poet as he went about his daily activities. He initially receives the Peruvian in his underwear, before dressing, covering his ‘thin adolescent-like legs.’[24] He complains of his heavy mining shoes, urinates, washes his ‘curly brown beard that trembled with hilarity,’ and combs his thin wet hair.[25]

In the hotel room, Ginsberg describes the pillars of the new American poetry, the Beat movement, as a group of young and bearded rebels who try to ‘put the academy to one side, and return poetry to a common language,’ in some senses returning to the physical origin of literature.[26]

‘In Greece, poetry was recited in movement,’ Ginsberg points out.

‘A similar poetry should be recorded instead of written,’ reflects La Torre.

‘Of course. Kerouac has a recorder, and we have done the same experiments.’

‘At the same time?’

‘Yes, chain poetry. You understand?… One afternoon we smoked marijuana, we started the tape, and we began to improvise one then the other… Marvellous! Mot exciting experienee! [sic]’

‘I can hardly believe it.’

La Torre, who later would describe the recital offered in the IAC as an ‘electrifying’ experience, asks him:

‘Do you write only when you are smoking marijuana?’

‘No, I write whenever I feel the necessity. Marijuana is a mode of experimentation. Look… In Machu Picchu there was no electricity, and I wrote this poem in the dark. This other one, during a bus trip.’[27]

The notebook is small with a brown cover, and its pages are full of ‘a slight cramped handwriting’ and pictures ‘as schematic as those a kindergarten student.’[28] It is here, in this same notebook, that Allen Ginsberg will make his notes about ayahuasca which will later be published in the book The Yage Letters (1963) as part of his correspondence with William S. Burroughs.

***

La Torre accompanies the poet to the bathroom, crossing through a narrow passage that ends in a wide hallway with a view of the battered patio of the hotel.

‘Do Peruvian poets have enlightenments?’ the beatnik asks.

‘Enlightenments?’

‘Yes, like saints and mystics do.’

‘We know of some poets that see the ‘blue devils’ on a daily basis,’ jokes the journalist, ‘but we do not know of anyone who has reached the point of a mystic – or poetic – enlightenment.’

‘A poet without enlightenment is a simple prosodic, a poor wretch,’ said Ginsberg, before moving toward the toilet to urinate.

The journalist asks him what it is that he is doing in Lima, if perhaps he is trying to follow in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac ‘on the road’ through South America.

The poet bursts out in laughter.

‘No, I came because they invited me to an international meeting convened by the University of Concepción in Chile, and also to see if I could find ayahuasca or marijuana.

‘And have you been able to smoke?’

‘A little… There is always someone who provides one with those things.’[29]

***

After an insipid breakfast, tea with lemon and biscuits, Ginsberg throws out the following notion: ‘Since society is not able to touch my soul with its dirty hands, there is no danger of its annihilation.’

‘It can do whatever it wants with my body, but it will never reach my soul,’ he adds as he walks toward the Plaza de Armas, beneath the cold drizzle of autumn.

The journalist, who knows that he is conversing with the ‘most exciting young poet of America,’ asks:

‘Are juvenile delinquents really beats?’

‘I was a juvenile delinquent. I smoked marijuana at fifteen, and that is delinquency. In jail I made friends with various thieves.’

‘How old are you?’

‘33. I have the beard and the age of Christ.’

‘Do you write political poetry?’ The journalist returns to his charge.

‘Please! Political poetry does not exist. Poetry comes from the soul, and politics can never reach there. Poetry cannot be used as propaganda. Even when it comes from a profound place, like in Neruda, it is always a sort of hypocrisy, a variety of selfishness that tries to impose a determined rule on others.’

‘Is there a beat theater?’

‘There is not beat poetry, or a beat novel, or beat painting. Beat is a poetic conception, an attitude toward the world. But, yes, we have done theater…’[30]

Finally the scene of the dialogue moves to San Martín Plaza, where the poet and the journalist conclude their chat. Due to the national strike, the streets of Lima seem empty and silent. ‘Where could I grab a taxi?’ the beatnik asks before the calm of the day. ‘I need to go to the embassy.’

They shake hands. La Torre says goodbye, not without promising to send Ginsberg two copies of the journal, one for him and the other for his editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Then Ginsberg contemplates leaving, ‘carrying on his narrow shoulders the curse and the disdain of 160 million honest and prosperous citizens in gray suits,’ until he disappears, like a magic trick, as he crosses through the doorway of the IAC.[31]

III.

Salazar Bondy introduced him to her, thinking that the two could have something in common. Raquel Jodorowsky was Chilean, but she had been living in Lima for a decade, and she represented a certain poetic sensibility.[32] An important part of the cultural scene of Lima, she was a beautiful woman the same age as Ginsberg who carried herself with extroverted confidence. During that period, Jodorowsky earned a living producing puppet shows for theater and television along with the very young Walter Curonisy. [33]

One day, Ginsberg asked if there was a place in Lima where he could eat European food, to which Jodorowsky offered to prepare him borscht.[34] That was the beginning. They realized how similar their lives were, along with their common roots. Both he and Jodorowsky were descendants of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants and, at least according to her personal legend, Ginsberg’s family and her own could have met each other on the ship that took them from Russia in the early years of the twentieth century.

They became friends, and he began to visit her. If Jodorowsky was giving a poetry workshop, Ginsberg would sit and wait for her in an armchair in her house, in Lince, where he would read the books that he found in her library. Then they began to make a habit of eating lunch together in Lima’s Chinatown, close to the central market. In her poem, ‘Oda a Allen Ginsberg (Ode to Allen Ginsberg),’ Raquel tells of how they stepped through the trash on Capón Street, ‘singing songs in Russian.’[35] After their lunches they would usually have a coffee in a bar downtown. In their strolls through Lima, the beatnik also met another great bard, Rafael Alberti, with whom he discussed Asian art.[36]

Jodorowsky was known for her captivating green eyes, for publishing books that she herself sold in recitals, and for being the feminine voice who at twenty-three years old had ‘appeared in Chilean feminine poetry after Gabriela Mistral’s first cycle,’ in the words of Rosamel del Valle.[37] The truth is that Ginsberg, a declared homosexual, identified with her. But his mother, lobotomized and dead, remained present in his unconscious. There was no turning back! In his search to find God, Ginsberg was at the edge of discovering the dichotomy of the universe. Ayahuasca would provide him with even more surprises.

***

As he spent time on the streets of Lima, Ginsberg hallucinated with ether. His intention was to describe the experience in a poem (which would later be published in the book Reality Sandwiches). Walter Curonisy remembers, in his ‘Poema a Allen Ginsberg (Poem to Allen Ginsberg)’, that the beatnik took him to his room ‘to look at the clock / of the season of ether,’[38] while, Jodorowsky in her own ode, recalls that he had her smell cotton balls, ‘promising me that I would see God and I did not.’[39]

Walter and Jodorowsky’s poems coincide with that of Ginsberg titled ‘Aether,’ which in one of its pages asks, ‘What can be possible / in a minor universe / in which you can see / God by sniffing the / gas in a cotton?’[40]At the end of Aether, Ginsberg seems to resign himself to the passing of time – ‘in this Hell of Birth & Death / 34 coming up – suddenly I felt old’ – whilst at the same time he comes to understand the solitude of his existence: ‘sitting with Walter & Raquel in a Chinese Restaurant – they kissed – I alone.’ [41]

Curonisy affirms, from Morocco, that after that night Ginsberg asked him if he would help him get to know Lima. ‘With a very negative reflection I guided him to the Montón [the trash dump of the city],’ he explains.[42] And in his poem he comments: ‘we saw how they fattened the pigs / and the fights between groups for a piece of glass.’[43]

This was the place where the trash trucks appeared, the miserable scene in which Ribeyro’s vultures without feathers struggled to survive. The beggars confused the poet with Fidel Castro because of his beard, which at that time was synonymous with guerrilla struggles. ‘Castro! Castro!’ they yelled as he passed through the rubbish.[44]

With that scene as background, in the middle of mountains of trash and flies, the beatnik asked Curonisy if he had read Rimbaud or The Songs of Maldoror, to which Walter responded no. He was only twenty years old at the time.

***

Ginsberg’s thirty-fourth birthday surprised him in Huánuco, wounded by sadness. The trip to the jungle was slow and lasted a week as he traveled the Tingo María-Pucallpa route lying on jackets in a rickety truck. On the shores of the Ucayali River, Ginsberg contacted a man named Ramón who had met Robert Frank, cinematographer of the movie Pull My Daisy,[45]who directed him to a shaman; Ginsberg would later describe him as ‘a very mild and simple seeming cat of 38 or so.’[46]During his first experience with ayahuasca in the jungle, Ginsberg began to see or feel what seemed to him to be ‘the Great Being,’ [47] which manifested itself in the form of a great moist vagina.[48] The hallucination consisted of an eye looking out from a great black hole, surrounded by fish, birds, serpents, and butterflies.

The following night, Ginsberg repeated the experience with a more potent dose. The trip was methanoic: he felt ‘the whole fucking Cosmos’ break loose around him,[49] and he described his trip in the follow way: ‘I think it was the strongest and worst I’ve ever had it nearly.’[50] Questions of life and death assaulted him quickly – the certainty of an irreparable and imminent end, and the drama of never being prepared.

Just the thought of dying made him sad. He thought of Peter and of his father. Under the effects of ayahuasca, he had a near-death experience. He wrote to William Burroughs: ‘the whole hut seemed rayed with spectral presences all suffering transfiguration with contact with a single mysterious Thing that was our fate and was sooner or later going to kill us.’[51]

After this experience, Ginsberg arrived at the conclusion that the only way to confront death would be in reproducing life. It was simple, but was nevertheless an outlet that he had never previously considered . In his biography, Schumacher notes that Ginsberg decided ‘to try to understand women better and, ultimately, have children.’ Women, he felt, now had the capacity to save him from ‘total obliteration.’ [52]

From his trips with ayahuasca, which he repeated often until June 24, 1960, Ginsberg wrote the poems ‘Magic Psalm’ and ‘The Reply,’ which were the most successful in transmitting and evoking his metaphysical trips. From the jungle, the gringo sent C. E. Zavaleta two bottles of the potion to be delivered to Marcia Koth, but only one of them ‘arrived in the hands of the doorman of the North American embassy.’[53]

Ginsberg’s idea was to consume and study the concoction in the United States. He was also interested in having Jack Kerouac drink it. Curonisy, who maintains that he accompanied Ginsberg throughout the journey, recounts that upon his return they brought more bottles of ayahuasca with them, which they later consumed at Jodorowsky’s house.[54]

***

In the small house owned by Jodorowsky, who died October 27, 2011, the sounds that invaded it more than half a century ago still echo. The ‘butterfly carved from iron’ frequently recounted memories of her friend from the same armchair where the beatnik would sit. [55] ‘Being homosexual is a very great solitude,’ she told me one afternoon as we talked about Ginsberg.

At eighty four years of age, Jodorowsky recalled, ‘once he asked me to have a child with him.’ At the beginning she thought he was joking with her, but the beatnik proposed the idea again as they crossed through the San Martín Plaza. ‘Seriously, I want to have a child with you,’ he insisted as he took her by the arm.

‘I was so surprised that I didn’t respond,’ the elderly poet recounted.[56]

In the ode she dedicated to Ginsberg, published in the collection Caramelo de sal, Jodorowsky reproaches him, ‘You put yourself in my life for days that stood still / stirring the brains of my worms,’ but later affirms that a son of theirs ‘would have been born with a soul.’[57]

On July 8, 1960, Ginsberg left the airport in Lima to return to the beat scene that now seemed to him so enveloping and crazy. A year later he would leave his country again, this time with India as his destination. That trip would permit him to continue his spiritual search. In 1994, Jorge Capriata found him changed. He was no longer the cheerful bearded individual the age of Christ who wanted to ‘see the face of God,’ but now was an old prophet. He still remembered Lima, the walls crowned with thorns, and the pale grey of our sky.[58] On April 5, 1997, Ginsberg would make his final trip to a world beyond, this time without ayahuasca.

[3] Sebastián Salazar Bondy (Lima 1924 – 1965). Important Peruvian intellectual. He was a writer, poet, critic, journalist and playwright, who became a distinguished character in the artistic scene of Lima in the mid-twentieth century, when he was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo or IAC) in Lima. He was responsible for Allen Ginsberg’s arrival in the Peruvian capital in 1960, since both had met in the Meeting of American Writers (Encuentro de Escritores Americanos) that took place at the University of Concepción in Chile.

[4]Católica is the colloquial name for the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, or Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, located in Lima.

[5] The order was completed by the North American writer and environmental activist Peter Matthiessen, who was returning from a long investigation in the Peruvian jungle and knew of Allen Ginsberg’s profound interest in ayahuasca. Predicting that Ginsberg would not have time to find it in Lima, he asked Jorge Capriata to deliver the potion for him.

[13] An old train station near the governmental palace in Lima whose name translates to the Station of the Defenseless.

[14] Martín Adán (Lima 1908 – 1985). Pseudonym for Rafael de la Fuente Benavides. He was one of the most distinguished Avant-Garde poets of Peru, known especially for his first book La casa de cartón, published in 1928. He was admitted to psychiatric clinics on various occasions due to problems with alcohol.

[23] Alfonso La Torre (Acomayo 1927 – Lima 2002). Peruvian journalist. He worked for the most important media sources of his time: El Comercio, Expreso, La Crónica, and the journal Cultura Peruana, and illustrated the pages of El Comercio Gráfico. He acted as an art critic under the pseudonym Seymour, and as a theater critic with the fearful nickname ALAT. He worked at the newspaper La República from its start in 1981 until his death. Recently, Peruvian playwright Sara Joffré has collected his theater criticism in the volume titled Alfonso La Torre: Su aporte a la citica de teatro peruano.

[32] Raquel Jodorowsky (Iquique 1927 – Lima 2011). Chilean poet and painter, sister of the well-known writer, cinematographer and pyschoshaman Alejandro Jodorowsky. She spent the majority of her life in Lima where she published books, got married and had a child. Casusol has also published ‘Jodorowsky no está sola esta tarde (Jodorowsky Is Not Alone This Afternoon)’ which can be found at http://letras.s5.com/rj191111.html.

[33] Walter Curonisy (Lima 1941 – Marrakech 2012). Peruvian actor and poet. At twenty years old he worked with Raquel Jodorowsky on a puppet show called ‘La puerta mágica,’ or ‘The Magic Door,’ in a theater in Lima called Entre Nous. He was one of the protagonists of the successful Peruvian soap opera Simplemente María (Simply María). He published three books of poetry: Los locos por el cielo, El matrimonio sagrado, and Rehenes del tiempo. He died June 12, 2012 in Morocco, where he acted as the director of a cultural center with his girlfriend Elvira Roca Rey. The news of his death arrived to Lima as the final revisions of this article were in progress.

[55] In her ars poética, Raquel Jodorowsky identifies herself as a ‘mariposa de fierro,’ or an ‘iron butterfly.’

[56] The relationship between Raquel Jodorowsky and Allen Ginsberg would continue for various decades, even if only through missives written on the first pages of books that the poet sent to his friend in Lima. In one of them, written in 1970, Ginsberg tells her: ‘Thought of you often (…) Have you been to Pucallpa yet? The forests are as important as the desert cities.’ Years later her brother, Alejandro, took advantage of the fact that Ginsberg was in Paris to ask him for his sister’s address, who at that moment was taking care of their mother, Sara Prullansky. According to the autobiography of the famous pyschoshaman, La danza de la realidad (The Dance of Reality), the poet was able to give him the information without a problem.

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Thank you for the auspicious writeup. The item in reality once were a new enjoyment account the item. Glimpse complex to be able to far more added gratifying on your part! Moreover, how should we keep up your distance learning?

Dear friend,
Right now I am writing a book about Allen Ginsberg´s South American period with my friend the chilean poet Rodrigo Olavarría. We keep you abreast of the progress of the book. Greetings from Lima, Peru.
Cheers,